Rice marketing expert available to comment on Budweiser beer’s name change to ‘America’

EXPERT ALERT

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Jeff Falk
713-348-6775
jfalk@rice.edu

Rice marketing expert available to comment on Budweiser beer’s name change to ‘America’

HOUSTON – (May 20, 2016) – Anheuser-Busch recently announced that the company is replacing the Budweiser logo with “America” on its 12-oz. cans and bottles later this month through the November election.

Credit: shutterstock.com/Rice University

Utpal Dholakia, the George R. Brown Professor of Marketing at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business and a marketing and consumer behavior expert, is available to comment on this development and the company’s branding strategy.

“On one level, the goal of these changes is obvious,” Dholakia wrote in a blog this week for Psychology Today. “Budweiser wants to claim the ‘patriotism’ value in consumers’ minds and gain the loyalty of every American beer drinker who sees himself or herself as patriotic. Drink Budweiser/America = Be a patriot. Decades of research by consumer psychologists have shown that consumers routinely use the country of a product’s origin as a shortcut when deciding what to buy, preferring domestically made products over foreign ones.”

However, the brand-name change has produced much consternation and criticism, Dholakia said, with marketing experts calling it “shameless” and “a joke.”

“It is one thing to use patriotic illustrations and motifs like flags and fireworks on product packaging or in commercials,” Dholakia wrote. “It is another thing entirely to change one’s brand name for months on end. None of the brands that are seen as more patriotic than Budweiser, whether it is Jeep, Levi’s or Harley Davidson, have changed their names entirely. There is good reason for this. Using research conducted by cognitive psychologists on how people categorize information in their memories and subsequently recall it, marketers have argued that the strongest asset of a brand is its name.”

To schedule an interview with Dholakia, contact Jeff Falk, associate director of national media relations at Rice, at jfalk@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.

Rice University has a VideoLink ReadyCam TV interview studio. ReadyCam is capable of transmitting broadcast-quality standard-definition and high-definition video directly to all news media organizations around the world 24/7.

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Follow the Jones Graduate School of Business on Twitter @ricemba.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Psychology Today blog on “Why Is Budweiser Changing Its Brand Name to ‘America’?”: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-science-behind-behavior/201605/why-is-budweiser-changing-its-brand-name-america.

Dholakia bio: www.business.rice.edu/person/utpal-dholakia.

Jones Graduate School of Business: http://business.rice.edu.